“How are you doing?” he said when I sat down.
“I’m here. I’m sober. I slept.” I looked at the window. November outside, gray and still. “Woke up early and lay there waiting for it to hit. It hasn’t yet. Maybe it will later.”
“What’s the plan for the day?”
“Flowers. Lindsay. Then home.”
He nodded. “I’m available today. All day. Phone’s on. If it gets hard at two in the afternoon or eleven at night, you call.”
“I know.”
“And Dutch and Colt — they know what today is.”
“Dutch texted this morning. Colt called last night.”
“Good. Use them.” Pete leaned forward. “You don’t have to get through today on your own, Holden. That’s not what any of this has been about.”
“I know,” I said again. And I did. A year ago I wouldn’t have.
“Thursday we’ll do the full session. Today I just wanted to see your face.” He stood. “Go see Danny’s mom.”
I drove to the flower shop.
Yellow roses. The same vase on the same sill. The same kitchen, the same coffee, the same chair. Eleven visits now. I’d stopped noticing the ritual of it — the parking, the door, the wave in — the way you stop noticing a drive you do every day. It had just become something I did.
We were halfway through our coffee when she said it.
“A year.” She turned her mug in her hands. “I wasn’t sure you’d keep coming, those first few months. I thought you might stop once it got easier.”
“It hasn’t got easier.”
“No. But it got different.” She looked at the photo of Danny on the sill. “The first time you sat at this table you couldn’t look at that picture. You remember?”
I remembered. I’d kept my eyes on the table, on my hands, on anywhere that wasn’t his face.
“Now you look at it every time you come in,” she said. “You don’t even know you’re doing it.”
She was right. I’d looked at it, at him, when I walked in today without thinking.
“These visits,” she said. “They’ve kept him alive for me. Hearing you talk about him — not just the run, not just the end. The other things. The tire he took twenty minutes on. The questions he asked. The way he’d show up early and pretend he hadn’t.” She smiled. “Nobody else tells me those stories. His friends from school stopped coming by months ago. But you keep showing up with your yellow roses and your stories about my son, and I get to hear his name said out loud in the room where he grew up.”
My throat tightened. “It’s helped me too,” I said. “More than I know how to say.”
“I know it has.” She put her hand over mine. “I can see it. That first visit you were barely holding on. Now you sit here and laugh about him.”
We sat for a while longer. She told me about a shoebox she’d found in his closet the week before — old route maps he’d drawn by hand, practicing, long before he’d ever been allowed near a real run. She’d kept them. I asked if I could see them next time.
“Next time,” she said. “And the time after that.”
As I drove home, I kept thinking about those route maps — Danny at his kitchen table, drawing lines on paper, planning runs he never got to go on. It still hurt. Just not as bad.
Back at the clubhouse I went to my room and sat on the bed. The compound was quiet for a Tuesday evening — brothers giving the day its weight without making a thing of it. I could hear someone in the kitchen down the hall. A TV on low in the common room. Normal sounds.
I picked up the journal from the nightstand. Opened it. Didn’t write anything. Just sat with it in my lap and looked at the room — the same room I’d been in a year ago when Bea had held me together.
The same walls. Different mattress — I’d got rid of the old one months ago. No big mattress-burning symbolism like Dutch. Just hauled it out and replaced it. Some things you don’t keep.
I heard a knock at my door. Figured it was probably Colt, maybe Dutch checking in again.
